Broadsword56

Just wait: When the Market Garden module comes out, we'll see posts whining about how having to move vehicles along those exposed, congested, elevated roads spoils all the fun, and why can't players just drive anywhere they want over the soggy fields? To each his own, but what a silly thing it is to trash a game because it isn't in some other location or period of the war. Go play something else, then! Either that, or... "Suck it up, soldier!"

You did a fantastic job, Veins -- I've got them all running. The only one I'm not sure about is tracers -- I haven't seen any red ones yet ingame, although they seem to look nicer than the ray gun laser effect the game came with. So I can't tell whether that mod is running. I just put the two "color" files into my Z file and that was it. I didn't see any .brz file to place there.

Ditto -- and I, too, really want to know whether our troops can go up high in the steeples to set up an O.P. These were hugely important objectives in the Bocage campaigns of 1944 because the overall terrain was so flat. Unless you had one of the coveted hilltops, or a church steeple to spot your artillery from, you just couldn't see anything more than a few hundred meters away.

+1 to this. It would make suppressive area fire a lot less fiddly.

Also, beware that minefields are almost guaranteed to be covered by enemy MGs and/or preregistered mortars (and if you're designing a scenario, be sure to do this to maximize your opponent's minefield misery).

If it's a sporadic bug, that's too bad but it's one I can live with for the time being -- since in real life a lot of orders got garbled or requested support didn't arrive, etc.

Thanks for the tips!

I'm getting 60.8 kb/sec, but I started the DL some 4 hours ago :-( Looks like there's still 1/3 of the progress bar to go. Not sure if it will be playable for me before bedtime tonight, but tomorrow may have to be a call-in-sick game-a-thon...

With all the posts and replies to the question, I'm more confused than ever. Could some one "take it from the top" and post the correct exact sequence to cease covering fire by a fire group and time it with an immediate assault by an assault group?

Just ask Stonewall Jackson...

Infantry all the way!

Yes, I've seen some of this process in Northern Virginia, around Civil War battlefields -- you can see where the old rail fencelines used to be, because after 150 years there's now a line of scrub and cedar trees grown up in their place. It happened naturally as birds perched on the fence, pooped out seeds, and the seeds took root. Imagine if you had several more centuries for the thicket to develop, and imagine if the rail fence had originally been a stone wall or an earthen berm. Voila - Norman hedgerow. (yes, I know -- fence and hedgerow grogs!)

Sounds logical, but not so much when you really look into the peculiarities of this particular campaign in Normandy in the summer of '44: * Yes, in theory battalions cooperated on attacks -- at least on paper, as far as the orders that came down from division HQ. So the map overlays would show starting times, objectives, phaselines, battalion boundaries, etc. *But in practice, the bocage terrain meant each battalion was really "fighting its own private war." While battalions were usually in radio or phone contact through higher HQ, they really couldn't see each other or cooperate effectively. It was extremely challenging even for battalions to get their companies coordinated. US accounts of the time seem to constantly mention companies and even entire battalions getting lost or out of contact. Normandy was truly a battalion commander's campaign. *Yes, it would be great if fresh units would be available to come up in a CMBN battle to take the next obstacle, etc. But again, consider... -- The time scale of a typical CMBN battle scenario (2 hours, 1 hour or even less). -- In this Normandy campaign, before Operation Cobra, the gains or losses of terrain from hour to hour or day to day were very very small -- often times just a few thousand meters, or a single apple orchard, or nothing at all. -- At the scale of 1 battalion, if you use the "2 up, 1 back" doctine of the time, then you've got your 2 rifle companies on the line and your 3rd rifle company is your reserve/flank guard/exploitation force. Anything beyond that is really beyond the scale of one CMBN battle and you should really just set up a new scenario representing the new situation. --While battalions could move fresh companies up, bringing fresh battalions up was another thing entirely, and not something that really could easily be done in the midst of an active battle. The process was complicated and it made the units extremely vulnerable while it was taking place. So the US battalion commanders really sweated the details of how/when the fresh troops would advance and occupy the frontline hedgerow positions while the troops on the line withdrew, all without confusion and without letting the enemy know it was happening -- because the Germans were notorious for launching an immediate attack whenever they knew a unit change was taking place. So the handovers were usually done at night and in silence, etc. Bottom line: CMBN seems (to me) just the right scale for this particular time and place in the war. The higher-level stuff is better simulated in a campaign or operational layer (using another game, as we've been discussing in other threads).

Please feel free to share AARs, screenshots, and progress reports on your operational campaign and the CMBN battles in it with the forum -- it will make an interesting showcase for campaign play, and entertaining reading for all of us.

I'm using (and highly recommend) St. Lo (West End Games), out of print but available many places online (I got mine from Noble Knight Games). Its scale (306 m per hex, counters are battalions and companies) fits perfectly with CMBN, where a comfortable size for a large battle would be, say, a battalion attacking a company-plus. I've been playing it solitaire and it's excellent for solitaire play. Once CMBN is released, I hope to map the sector where the US 35th ID and part of the 29th ID fought the German 352nd ID (since we don't have the German paratroop units available yet for the eastern part of that campaign). I've done some preliminary work using Google Earth, and found that this entire AO fits within two 4km x 4km maps plus one 2 km x 4km map. Those are still large maps to make for CMBN, so if possible I'm going to map them with just the elevations and basic terrain, then bite off smaller areas for battle scenarios and map only those in fine detail. If anyone is interested, I can share the Cyberboard module for St. Lo, and I also have made an initial draft of conversion rules for using St Lo with CMBN -- they'll require some tweaking and testing, though, as time goes on.

Good question, Magpie -- I also wondered that, or if there might ever be any way to import things like DEM data, or even grayscale JPEG heightmaps, into the map editor to speed up the terrain creation process.

I tried this link and just get dead links and blank images. Is there a better way to get the tutorial, or could someone post it in the BF repository?

Since Joe Balkoski's "Beyond the Beachhead" is the only good book on the subject in my library, I'll quote what he writes about this: Besides Schutze I (the MG42 machine gunner), "the rest of the German squad was devoted almost entirely to feeding the ravenous MG42 [it fired 1,200 rounds per minute]. One of the primary duties of German riflemen, in fact, was to carry ammunition forward to the machine gun crew. An MG42 in battle would typically expend 3,000 rounds per day -- the equivalent of 150 BAR magazines."

Just to clarify -- Is that single height of the water table modifiable? Or is it always preset to a certain height (like 0 meters)? If it's modifiable, I'd always start a map by setting the water table to the known height of my main bodies of water -- the ponds or features I definitely want to appear. I'd use the "set all tiles to the same height" feature, then build up all my other elevations from the water elevation.

Also, I'll bet fitness and training and experience might affect the likelihood of a single soldier or team doing this.

That rocks, Rocky! Can you share a few more details about the circumstances -- I'm curious to know what orders the unit originally had, whether it was an AT team that had been split out from a squad, and whether it had any particular facing or target orders in effect at the time. I'm wondering whether any particular variables like that make it more or less likely for a unit to do what your brave little AT unit did. And there are certain cases when we might want a unit to hold its position no matter what, and not go off to hunt from what it thinks is a better spot (I guess "hide" ensures that, right?).

BF could just have a "brook/stream" tile that is regular terrain with a water texture running through it (not actual water and no terrain effect), just so those could be represented and look good on the maps. Also, they would play a role in clueing players to the low spots of the topography and likely locations of muddy/swampy ground.

I wish there had been a way for BF to create a special "bocage foxhole" that would appear to be dug into the berm (like a 2D decal on a special tile maybe), that wouldn't deform the terrain or ruin FOW. Then maybe something could have been abstracted so that a unit on it would get a foxhole defensive benefit in addition to the bocage benefit. Anyway, I'm glad to learn that about the forward foxhole and LOS. I'll have to experiment with that and see how it works.

Love 99.9% of everything about the demo, but I'd say this is my #1 and only significant concern about the game so far. I understand the technical reasons BF couldn't allow foxholes and trenches in the hedgerows. But it's a design compromise that could fundamentally change the balance of the tactics and outcomes of the game. I guess with the current system, one could set up occupied foxholes 2 action points behind a bocage line, deploy a few split scouts as observation posts on the hedgerow itself, and then move the bulk of the force to the hedgerow or back to the foxholes as necessary, depending on whether there's a barrage or an approaching infantry attack. That would also protect German MGs against the standard US hedgerow tactic of clobbering the far corners of the field with HE and smoke. Just keep the MGs sheltered, wait until the preparatory fire and mortar barrage ends, then man the MGs and repel the attack. Any thoughts? Does the current system really wreck the historical tactics?

Agreed 200% Frustration due to poor interface, bugs, clunky design (not a problem in CMBN) = bad Frustration due to realism and having to face what the actual troops/commanders faced = fun!